Displacement is the perfect marriage of a program and a project. The
program, AWOL: Art Without Limits is about creating new forums for
discussion on art through site specific installations, happenings and non-
traditional exhibition spaces. The project, Displacement, is a conversation
based on the art of displaced cinema. Both the program and project value the
importance and effect of space, and both challenge traditional expectations
of what an exhibition site can and should be. This project, a collaboration
between GOCA and TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, will
be presented on the top floor of the Kiowa & Nevada parking garage in
downtown Colorado Springs. Lectures will be offered to further explore the
discourse of expanded (or displaced) cinema, aural experimentation,
spectatorship, the recontectualization of found-footage, and parkour (the
art of movement).

Displacement: Cinema Out of Site is collaboration and presentation of film
works by contemporary Argentine and North American avant-gardists to
encourage an intercontinental dialogue between artists. These artists,
writers and curators are presenting moving image and sound creations on the
concrete structure of a public parking garage. To understand the
presentation and its relationship to parkour we must understand
displacement. Rachel Cole, a participating artist, wrote “Place isn’t lost,
it is rather “displaced,” undone, emptied of meaning of itself, a location
without linear measurement.” Displaced is not misplaced. The cinema and this
program are not lost; instead they have been stripped of popular
expectations for what they should be. Many would say art should be in a
gallery and film in a theater. This project uses an existing space, urban
architecture, to redefine the viewer’s experience of the work presented.

A series of three lectures featuring filmmakers, artists and curators
accompany this one-night-only film presentation. Each lecture pairs two
speakers each with keen insight into the philosophies and techniques
explored through the films.

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AUG. 7 at the Colorado Springs City Hall - Council Chambers (107 N. Nevada
Ave.)
Christopher May and Jimmy Gable will discuss the notion of displacementand
displaced cinema and the history and philosophy of parkour.

Lecture notes from Christopher May:
Displacement occurs when the Id wants to do something of which the Super ego
does not permit. The Ego thus finds some other way of releasing the psychic
energy of the Id. Phobias may also use displacement as a mechanism for
releasing energy that is caused in other ways. See also: Fantasy,
Projection, Expanded Cinema, Curatorial Daydreaming, Surrealism.

Lecture notes from Jimmy Gable:
Topic 1: Georges Hebert-Founder of Methode naturelle-Grand Father of Parkour
-During a visit to Africa he was impressed by the physical ability of an
indigenous tribe. This tribe had no instructors or prodigy gymnasts to learn
from. They just had their life in the tribe. By living that life in their
natural environment (having to climb trees, hunt and survive) they
progressed and gained immense physical skill naturally as they grew older.
-As a Naval officer stationed in Mariniques, during 1902, the volcano, Mount
Pelee, erupted in martinique. Georges would coordinated the rescue of some
700 people that day and his already established belief in altruism would be
reinforced.
-After these events, Georges would take his strong hold on altruism and
combine it with this new concept of physical discipline to create something
new. A new philosophy, "methode naturelle", in which the goal of the
practitioner is three fold:
-1.To obtain a Virile Sense (courage, willpower, perseverance, calmness)
-2.To obtain a Moral sense (altruism, aiding, benevolence, chivalry in a
sense)
-3.To obtain a Physical sense (Control and awareness over muscles and
Breathing)
A Practitioner of "methode naturelle" is somewhat of a modern day Knight or
Jedi.-This methode naturelle would soon be installed in the French military.
It will also ultimately lead to the creation of "parcours" or obstacle
course.

Topic 2: Raymond Belle-Father of David Belle-Inspiration for David
-This brings us to Raymond and David Belle. Father and Son. Raymond being
the Father/inspiration and David being the founder of parkour.
-Raymond Belle was trained in the French military, using Hebert's "methode
naturelle". He would excel in his training, becoming very physically able.
He would soon leave the military, however, and become part of the "sapeur-
pompier" or the French Fire Fighting team. With his training in "methode
naturelle", Raymond would become the rope-climbing champion and would join
the regiment's elite team, reserved for only the fittest and most capable
fire fighters.
-During his career, Raymond will become known for his many medals and key
role in the saving of lives as a pompier. This heroism and physical
capability displayed by Raymond will be inspiration to Parkour's Founder,
David Belle.

Topic 3: David Belle: Founder of Parkour
-As the son of Raymond Belle, David would grow up practicing "methode
naturelle" with obstacle courses, gymnastics and martial arts. As he became
more physically skilled, David will search for more of a practical use of
his physical capabilities. This will lead to the founding of parkour.

Topic 4: Parkour: Definition
Parkour is a discipline, non-competitive in nature, with the focus on the
ability to move over, below, around, through, or anything to get by an
obstacle as quickly and as efficiently as possible, as if in pursuit,
usually in an urban environment. It's about having the control and the know-
how to create movement through an environment efficiently. So as pretty as
they are, flips are not considered to be a part of parkour as they are
wasted movement.
-It is commonly confused with the similar activity, Free Running, in which
the practitioners focus more on the creativity of the movement rather than
the efficiency. It is also often misinterpreted as more of a show-off-y
sport rather than a controlled disciplined mainly thanks to the videos on
youtube that show giant leaps and dangerous drops without any training or
fundamentals. While parkour can consist of rooftop gaps and highly
impressive moves, it isn't about going the biggest or highest, nor is it
even about going higher and bigger than somebody else.
-It is about all the movement from small to big, from the ground to the
roof. It is about progressing yourself. It is much more common for traceurs
to stay ground level and train with each other (helping, advising and
encouraging) than to ascend to the rooftops and just show off. There will
always be friendly competition, and thats healthy, as with anything, but the
true spirit of parkour is non-competitive.

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AUG. 8 at the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (315 E. Costilla)
Pablo Marin and Gregg Savage will discuss found footage and people as
instruments.

Lecture notes from Pablo Marin:
Found-footage, the practice of recontectualization of someone else’s
audiovisual materials, has certainly come a long way since its almost
uncertain beginnings in the twentieth century. In perfect symbiosis with the
groundbreaking concept of ready-mades in the field of art, this tradition
surpassed practically every film frontier, from documentary to fiction, to
find its true place within the avant-garde, where its nature is constantly
redefined by both conceptual and technological possibilities. This lecture
will focus on one personal way to approach found-footage. One that’s mainly
physical, raw and focused on displaced movement.

Lecture notes from Gregg Savage:
Making music from the sounds of traceurs in the field, Gregg will talk about
the experience of creating the music and sound worlds for the event
Displacement: Cinema Out of Site. He will explore why it is essential for
techology and tradition to find a happy medium in creating art, why
randomness and chaos are essential to creativity, and how the philosophy and
inspiration of Parkour can be utilized in making music.

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AUG. 9 at the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (315 E. Costilla)
Dan Mancini and Rachel Cole will discuss the Tetris Effect and on-site
distraction.

Lecture notes from Dan Mancini:
As a recurring practice parkour takes root in the mind. An apposite analogy
is the Tetris Effect, wherein after extended bouts of Tetris, people
consistently report seeing the entire world, buildings and cars, as
tetrominoic pieces to be fit together. Similarly, through the proclivity of
parkour, walls and railings that traditionally herd people around become
open ended, a canvas on which to apply new physical rules. This phenomenon
exemplifies the neroplasticity of the human brain, by which parkour
literally amends a tracer’s perception of physical spaces, and even abstract
ideas.

To improve in parkour is to improve your mind more than your body. The
mental task of parkour quickly outpaces the physical task and a traceur will
quickly begin to realize that they previously considered the end of
possibility is very remote to what our bodies can really do. In the last
weeks for example, I've committed my own training not to expanding my skill
set but instead to surmounting the fear that keeps that skill set limited to
comfortable ground level places. As a simple mantra in recent practice, I
will not allow myself to walk away from a motion out of fear or laziness. If
after all reductionist consideration, either of these feeling is all that
remains to tell me "no", I must override and make the leap, or the climb, or
the crawl. Before long, this mantra manifests itself in more common tasks.
If I don’t want to talk to that group of girls out of anxiety, or plant
trees in my yard because I'm too lazy, I have the rehearsed ability to veto
those emotions.

At some point while playing around above a city, a traceur is poised with
the role of their skills. Where most people cannot go a traceur now has the
ability to break from the herd; to use the world at their leisure. They are
transitory übermenschen. At some point a traceur must consider the role of
the Übermensch in an egalitarian society. A traceur is annexed to the
aggregate, but not bound within it. Much like the Byronic heroes of
Arthurian legend, many traceurs agree on a sense of responsibility that
comes with the art. When adventuring about the cityscape much scrutiny is
placed on safety, sustainability, and the "leave no trace" rule, but the
responsibilities of parkour extend past the self and onto society. It is the
responsibility of the traceur not to use their abilities to do wrong, but
for utilitarian application. Obviously someone who can scale buildings and
fences would make a peerless thief, but the same skills can be applied to
the pursuit of criminals, or to rescuing those in danger, or simply for the
strength to act in any situation with a proverbial big stick; specifically
the preemptive security that one can at any time flee, deftly and
decisively. Parkour in a small way allows a man to break traditional rules
for the greater good.

Lecture notes from Rachel Cole:
To make a series of films in conversation with each other about movement and
to take the discipline of Parkour as a specific study, does not simple
invite an interrogation into the cinematic possibilities of “the art of
displacement,” but is to ask the question, how is movement seen and how does
it inhabit the camera lens, the projection screen, the receptive eyes of the
viewer? Though entirely different as art forms in terms of medium,
preservation, participation and so forth, Parkour and experimental film
share the quality of continual disturbance: the land, the background, the
scene, the figures enveloped in it are transiently in the frenzy of the un-
locatable, fleeting present. Displacement asks us to locate ourselves and
thus be physical, embodied, carnally un-whole as much as starkly self-
conscious. These are mediums that create a spectacle of which boundaries are
defined but uncharted, already in the past tense, and as creatures (both
material and apparitional), we find ourselves continually in the processes
of distraction, in a sort of topographical stream of consciousness,
bewildered as well as wildly nomadic, instanter to instanter.

This lecture will include readings of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses and
Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch as well as elements of distractive
spectacle, probably among other things.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Christopher May is the founder and primary curator behind TIE, The
International Experimental Cinema Exposition. For the past ten years, May
has curated and presented film programs for museums, universities and film
societies including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Austrian Film
Museum, MALBA - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, ICA-Boston,
Cinemateca Uruguaya, and San Francisco Cinematheque. His (Super-8 & 16mm)
film work currently explores the sensually visceral qualities of cinema and
their topographical relationships with sub-cultural landscapes.

Jesse Kennedy is a writer and filmmaker. He currently works exclusively in
Super 8, a format in keeping with his interest in what poet Eileen Myles has
termed “pathetic technologies:” seemingly simple, neglected, and/or
antiquated technologies (from conversation to VHS), through which one may,
nonetheless, still explore the limits of the possible. He has a BA in
Writing and Literature from Naropa University, in Boulder, CO. His poetry
has appeared in Bombay Gin. His films have been previously exhibited by TIE.
He currently lives in El Rito, New Mexico.

Pablo Marín was born in 1982 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Besides teaching
and writing on avant-garde film (laregioncentral.blogspot.com) he’s a
film/video curator and filmmaker. His films were premiered at several TIE
festivals and tour programs and shown at International Film Festival
Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Starting from Scratch (Netherlands),
Pleasure Dome (Canada), Avanto Festival (Finland), no.w.here (England),
amongst others. In 2009 he was invited as visiting artist to FAC’s Found-
footage Workshop in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Gregg Savage is a composer of guitar and computer music who enjoys
challenging perceptions of harmony and dissonance. He brings his background
in avant-garde sound art, film composing, and underground dance music to
fuse together compositions from non-traditional sound objects. He has a BM
from Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA where he studied guitar and
music synthesis. His music was recently featured in the 3 panel film project
Film (Parkour) in the Masterpieces of New American Avant-Garde Cinema
program at the Austrian Film Museum. He lives in Colorado.

Rachel Cole is a fiction writer who grew up in Denver and the Appalachians.
She received a BA in English with a minor in Continental Philosophy from the
University of Denver and is currently enrolled in the Literary Arts Program
at Brown University. She is particularly fascinated by corporeal philosophy,
20th century to present studies in linguistics, the politics of territory,
and trauma in contemporary art. Her interest in experimental film is the
instability of images, the event of spectacle, and the intimacy of beauty
which ignites the sensuality of binaries as much as the crisis of
boundaries. A curated text project is forthcoming from zingmagazine #22.

Jesse Kennedy is a writer and filmmaker. He currently works exclusively in
Super 8, a format in keeping with his interest in what poet Eileen Myles has
termed “pathetic technologies:” seemingly simple, neglected, and/or
antiquated technologies (from conversation to VHS), through which one may,
nonetheless, still explore the limits of the possible. He has a BA in
Writing and Literature from Naropa University, in Boulder, CO. His poetry
has appeared in Bombay Gin. His films have been previously exhibited by TIE.
He currently lives in El Rito, New Mexico.

Dan Mancini has practiced parkour in Colorado Springs for the last four
years, working with traceurs across the country and publications such as The
New Yorker, The Associated Press. His most specialized interests to date
include human social dynamics and courtship ritual, pop-ethnography
journalism, and catching pokemons. He is currently out of work but fills the
void with lots of hobbies and short, voltile relationships. "My biggest
struggle right now has been the move to give up trying to impress myself and
just earnestly love oneanother, each and every one of my brothers and
sisters riding this big blue rock through space. So long as my eyes are
looking towards heaven I will continue to love."

Jimmy Gable has practiced parkour in Colorado Springs for several years.
"I'm a God fearing young man. I recently got baptized. I have never been
intoxicated in my entire life and I don't plan to. I don't really fit into
any of the classic "cliques"...or it could be I kinda fit into all of them.
Either way, I don't fit into just one. I'm always in the mood for a deep,
intellectual conversation (even if im not deep or intellecutal, I can try).
I'm always in the mood to do parkour (even if my body isn't). I love to
drive my car, especially at night; and I haven't decided if I want to tune
it or not."